The increased mobility of telecommunication devices (wireless modem equipped laptops, PDA devices, smart phones, etc.) has spawned software applications which may provide or utilize location-relative information. Such applications, for example, may include up-to-date digital maps, addresses of nearby facilities (like restaurants, businesses, and shops), local weather forecasts, listing a of nearby entries from a personal address book, or local geographic data. The software applications themselves run on an application processor but may utilize external GPS (Global Positioning System) information to acquire the device's position as input for the various location-based applications.
Complex, GPS-enabled mobile devices, especially those with multiple processors, may need a way to share or multiplex a given network connection between GPS-related data traffic and application-related data traffic. This may be because only one point-to-point (PPP) connection is available for a given network at one time.